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He turned back with a grin, closing the window to keep out the chilly morning air. “Ah, if I fall, there’ll be someone there in a minute to set my broken bones,” he said, crawling back next to her. “You know I’ve got guards patrolling night and day.”
She snuggled against him. Even that brief moment at the window had cooled his skin. “Well, I don’twantyou broken. Could you tell what’s going on?”
“Smelled like smoke. Maybe a fire up the street.”
“Oh, I hope not.”
“Nothing you can do about it. Go back to sleep.”
He did, almost on the instant, but Madeleine lay awake for the better part of an hour. It wasn’t the commotion in the neighborhood that kept her eyes wide open, but the commotion in her head. The constant churn of worry and fear and indecision. What should she do?
Life had changed dramatically in the two weeks since she had confronted the Council. That very afternoon, Reese had moved into her father’s house, bringing his very masculine presence and a cadre of soldiers. He had ostentatiously taken a room on the opposite side of the balcony and made it clear to Madeleine that he was here to protect her, not seduce her. They had slept separately for three days before she went to him in the middle of the night and simply said, “I can’t bear to be apart from you.” After that, he shared her bed.
It had been a surprise to her, how much she relished lovemaking. She had always enjoyed Tivol’s warm affections—his kisses, the feel of his arm around her shoulder, the way she fit so neatly against his body when he took her in a loose embrace. Few of the women in her set were virgins, and she’d been willing to experiment outside the marriage bed, but Tivol had always rather sweetly insisted that they wait. Now, of course, she was certain he was following Harlo’s directive to let her body mature to its optimum state, but she had been so charmed that she had never pushed the matter. Nonetheless, she had expected to derive a certain amount of pleasure from their intimate relations.
But she hadn’t expected this—this—cravingshe felt for Reese’s touch, this sense of starvation she experienced when she had been apart from him for more than a day. She hadn’t been prepared for the absolute giddiness of physical delight. It was wrapped up with but somehow separate from the emotional madness of love—an extra dimension—a magnifier of all the things she already felt.
“I love this so much,” she whispered to Reese one night. “I’m afraid I’m becomingwanton.”
He laughed and gathered her tightly to him. “You could not say anything that pleased me more,” he assured her.
So Reese had been the greatest, and the happiest, change in her life. But around the sun-drenched circle of his presence was a ring of pitch-black night, and every day the darkness encroached more and more closely on Madeleine’s bewildered heart.
She had fulfilled her promise and presented herself at the temple. Harlo himself had cut a slice in her arm and collected the liquid that fell. Reese had accompanied her, a physician of his choosing beside him, and the instant they thought Madeleine grew weak, they practically snatched her away from the high divine’s hold. She didn’t stay to watch him pour her blood into his infernal fountain, but it seemed to have some effect. At any rate, the tremors that had rumbled beneath the city for days died away to nothing.
Impossible to know how long the partial offering would satisfy the god.
She shifted position in the bed, trying not to wake Reese. She always came to the same conclusion: If the city erupted—if the continent exploded at the seams—it would be her fault. If people died and mountains crumbled and the entire civilization sank into the sea, Madeleine would be to blame. She could not endure the idea of bearing a child and sending it off to be killed. But she could not live with the guilt of destroying the world.
She had never shared her thoughts with Reese. He knew that she was troubled about the role she had been assigned, he knew that she felt great responsibility and concern, but he didn’t know how deep her anguish ran.
“We’ll go to my property in Chibain,” he told her on the nights he noticed her distress and thought he could soothe her.
“I thought Mount Dar was already spewing ash and cinders?”
“That mountain has stood for a thousand years. It won’t come apart now. We’ll be safe.”
But the world would not be safe.
She flung an arm over her eyes, trying to block out what little light filtered through the room. She didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to murder her sons and send her daughters off to terrible fates. But she didn’t know what to do.
When Madeline woke in the morning, Reese was gone. Truly gone, because he was off to meet with a merchant who ran a mining operation about a day’s ride outside of the city. She buried her face in his pillow and breathed in the traces of his scent. She would put this pillow in the closet so the maid wouldn’t wash the casing before he returned.
As soon as she was dressed, she made her way down to the kitchen. It was still something of a shock to realize how many people were likely to be in the house at any given point—two or three soldiers always on watch in the great open atrium, two or three more who could be glimpsed through the windows, patrolling the fence. Reese’s manservant and secretary had also taken up residence, though she thought the secretary might have lodgings of his own somewhere in the city. If so, he almost never used them. She didn’t mind the extra bodies—she rather liked the purposeful bustle of having a large household to care for. Until she remembered why all those new additions were suddenly in her halls and spare bedrooms.
The kitchen was the busiest room in the mansion, since an undercook and two serving girls had been hired to help feed the expanded numbers. Norrah looked up as Madeleine wandered in.
“Good morning, dona,” she said. “Are you looking for breakfast?”
“I’mstarving.”
“Aussen, why don’t you make up a plate of eggs and toast for the dona? And some fruit, too.”
Madeleine appropriated a piece of bread from the counter and nibbled it as Aussen began gathering food. “Did anybody else wake up last night, hearing noise in the street?”
The undercook looked up from where she was stirring a pot on the stove. “Yes! And this morning we learned there was a big fire.”
“Two streets over. An entire house burned down,” Norrah confirmed.
